War on crime?

How do you like this?

“The need to prove a suspect’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt should be relaxed in serious criminal cases to make it easier to convict organised crime bosses and people traffickers, Tony Blair said yesterday”

So the more serious the crime, the lower the burden of proof? I think I see what they are getting at here — they want to be able to secure convictions in situations where it is almost impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is the directing force behind an organised criminal enterprise. But it seems a dangerous precedent: more from Blair:

“I think people would accept that, within certain categories of case, provided it’s big enough, you don’t take the normal burden”

…and I’m sure some people would accept that. Quite a few people would probably have been happy to send Ian Huntley down without going to the trouble of trying him at all. But the risk here is that where the CPS can intimidate the public with a sufficiently large and nasty allegation/threat, they will be allowed to cast aside a pretty fundamental principle of British criminal justice in the process of locking someone up for a very long time. I’m not going to rehearse the 1984 comparisons here, but I will say that I think that a free society needs to be bloody careful before heading off along that road.